oil prices

As I will explain in my forthcoming book, Automobiles Über Alles: Capitalism and Transportation in the United States, no topic is more forbidden to public utterance than corporate capitalists’ intractable collective addiction to selling cars. Despite the increasingly obvious suicidal insanity of permitting this addiction to continue, even its mere existence still cannot be mentioned in public.

If you doubt this, check out the latest dog-and-pony show conducted in the U.S. Congress: the June 23, 2008 House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing called “Energy Speculation: Is Greater Regulation Necessary to Stop Price Manipulation? – Part II.”

What did the two wings of the Business Party have to say in this bit of theater?

More interesting and, as always, much less honest is the D faction of the Business Party. What is its way of avoiding the Carmageddon issue on behalf of the choosing class?

Well, for starters, where would you guess, if the D Team really were an opposition party, the Chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce might come from? California? Seattle? Portland or Eugene, Oregon? Madison, Wisconsin? Or some other hotbed of ecology, right?

But from whence does the actually existing Energy Chair arise? Why, Detroit, of course!

And what does the Honorable Motor City representative have to say about why “America is addicted to oil”? It’s not really a problem of demand, of course:

The environmental community says the answer is to conserve energy, to change the way we live, work, and play.

Well, that’s:

a valid point.

But it isn’t any part of the business of Congress, since the structure of demand is just one of many:

long-term solutions that will likely take at least 10 years; they will do little to solve the immediate problem we face.

In reality, the urgent business of Congress, this fine D-bot Chair says, is not to raise the issue of why we’re addicts. No, it is to start by observing:

The Saudis note that oil supply-and-demand seem to be in balance and that there is no substantive basis for current prices.

Got that? “There is no substantive basis for current prices” of petroleum! We have no underlying problem!

So what is the trouble we face?

Even the Department of Energy’s own Energy Information Administration says that “the flow of investment money” has contributed to the spike in oil prices. Yet the Secretary of Energy dismisses speculation as a cause of spiking oil prices and the Treasury Secretary agrees, shrugging it off as a “tough period.” In short, real solutions from this Administration are harder to find than a $3 gallon of gas.

See? See? It’s just the dealers, man! They’re gouging us, man — totally harshing our buzz, man! We just need to get some new dealers, see! Help us rough up our dealers, OK, man?